Upgrade your account to a Community Supporter account and remove most of the site ads.

Reply to thread

Message: <blockquote data-quote="billd91" data-source="post: 9853272" data-attributes="member: 3400">I think the fairly obvious is that nobody decided this explicitly. Rather, it was the byproduct of other decision that had unintended side effects.This is the big, granddaddy reason. Once you started working with skills, largely starting with adding the thief, someone was gonna be the skill monkey and someone else was gonna not be when the classes had even footing on this before.When going to the skill system, the rogue had to be loaded with skills to continue to do the thing they could do before - that meant a lot of skill points to spend. Everyone else got a lot less. Then take a look at what the fighter gained in 3e compared to everyone else. Nobody gains feats like the fighter does. Between level-based and bonus feats, they get a ton more than anyone else - meaning they can develop weapon prowess in more than one weapon, a couple of fighting styles, or maybe a weapon and a bunch of general feats to improve their saves or skills. Having just 2 skill points per level seemed OK - a full BAB and tons of feats would be powerful enough for general class balance.At least that was the potential that was seen. Then the poop hit the fan.Feats didn't compete with full casters because they didn't scale with level - they had to be bought to stack up abilities.Players optimized. They dumped Int so the whole Combat Expertise chain tended to be moot. They may even have LOST skill points from it. Players didn't branch out with general feats, but focused on specific combat trees for more exploits or DPR. Too many feats gave out conditional benefits that depended on the style of campaign. Lots of humanoid opponents optimized to fight with their weapons? Improved Disarm can be good. Few humanoids compared to monstrous opponents? Improved Disarm is useless. And let's not forget that just doing hit point damage is the best tactic of all if you want to actually defeat something...And I think it's mainly a case of unintended consequences. They didn't realize that the 3e feat structure wasn't gonna work out as expected when they published it.</blockquote>

Verification